know the biggest park in the U. S. was right
across the street," said Connie Sackett, who
operates an information booth in town.
"None of us want to see this area ruined,"
said John Downes, chamber president. "But
we feel more access to the park would bring
more people here."
"Wilderness is disappearing faster than
people think," I was told in Anchorage by
Paul Haertel, associate regional director for
national parks in Alaska. "Wrangell-St. Elias
is a treasure worth preserving, a large intact
ecosystem rarely found any more. We see our
selves as bankers, saving it for the future."
No feathers are more ruffled than those of
hunters. In addition to limiting sport hunting
to preserves, officials have limited shooting
caribou, long a meat source for Alaskans. Sur
veys show the park's estimated 6,000 caribou
have been whittled to fewer than 2,000 within
the past decade.
"For 20 years I took caribou around Gul
kana," a hunter told me. "Now they tell me I
can't do that any more because the animals are
decreasing. But the wolves are causing that,
and the Park Service protects them."
The park has become a laboratory for a
study of wolf predation.
"Although there are many environmental
and behavioral factors at work, we believe
wolf populations drop when their prey
decreases, and the caribou numbers then
gradually increase," explained park biologist
Kurt Jenkins. "Trouble is, we don't know
how long this takes, maybe longer than the
lifetimes of the biologists studying it. In the
meantime, we've complicated the process by
adding people as a caribou predator."
"We're not here to guarantee an oppor
tunity to shoot an animal," Jay Wells said
patiently one afternoon. "We're here to main
tain a natural system."
NationalGeographic, May 1994